Reviews for City form and natural process

The average rating for City form and natural process based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-07 00:00:00 Arthur Fier As someone rather new to the field of urban ecology, this textbook was both a great introduction to terminology (it has a glossary in the back) and overwhelming. Ultimately, cities are unique ecosystems driven by human-biophysical interactions, which--to oversimplify--results in spatial heterogeneity, constant disequilibrium, and unique microclimates. Alberti presents the many hypotheses on each chapter subject and usually concludes each chapter with a related project her research group in Washington state has performed or is performing. Despite the textbook now being a dozen years out of date, current literature expresses the same ultimate conclusion: urban ecology needs a unifying master theory. The article by McPhearson et al. (2016) called Advancing Urban Ecology to a Science of Cities is a good follow-up to this textbook. The article mentions the importance of a commitment to socio-ecological-technical systems (SETs) framework, which has indeed grown in popularity.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-12 00:00:00 Rodney Schlink What a momentous book on Chinese culture and literature. This is a VERY geeky book, but if you're into mythology and how different cosmological models permeate all of Chinese culture, this is a fantastic book to start with. I won't lie, at some points, it was a little bit tedious, but mostly because of the sheer amount of information Campany cramps into it. However, his insights and the way he connects and digs deeper into the usefulness of such anomaly texts are invaluable. Definitely, a must-read for people in classic Chinese translation or interested in medieval China and beyond.